SUMMARY:

• SAFe Certified Scrum Master wif 8 years’ experience in Agile and 23 years’ experience in IT. I lead by facilitating, coordinating, and coaching wifin a Scrum Team, as a Servant Leader.
• These include halping organizations self - organize, self-manage, and thrive in achieving their delivery goals using TEMPeffective Scrum and Lean practices.

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Tools: Jira, QC/ALM, Version One, MS Office, SQL, TFS (Team Foundation Server), Confluence, HipChat, Share Point, Clarity, Tableau

Skills and Core Competencies: Scrum, Agile, Kanban, Lean, Scaled Agile Frameworks (SAFe) Continuous Integration, Servant Leadership, Sprint Ceremonies Planning, Backlog Grooming/Refinement, Daily Standup, Retrospectives, Reviews; Burn Down Metrics, Velocity, Facilitation, Retrospective, DCO (Directly Capture Objectives), Pega Systems, Program Increment (PI) Planning, Maturity Assessment, Scrum of Scrums

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

SAFe Senior Scrum Master

Confidential, Raleigh/Durham, NC

Responsibilities:

• As a Servant Leader, halped Infrastructure team to self-organize and self-mange using Kanban principles and board to track their work for installing 3000 conference rooms wif one-touch dial-in for WebEx, Skype and Microsoft Teams.
• Participated as part of an Agile Release Train (ART), during PI Planning, Scrum of Scrums, and System Demos, by halping my teams identify dependencies and risks, resulting in all teams understanding the PI goals and planning Features and stories for the next quarter.
• Added WIP limits to the Kanban boards to halp the teams visualize the work, resulting in teams no longer overcommitting to work and completing the work faster.
• Recommended the team build in quality when they discovered defects and received unfavorable feedback from users, resulting in conference rooms that were easier to utilize.
• Collaborated wif Program Manager to setup 16 Jira projects, boards, structures and confluence team pages and dashboards for new Scrum Masters, resulting in new Scrum Masters being able to start working wif their teams faster.
• Facilitated coaching for all Product Owners on agile principles and Scrum ceremonies, writing User Stories, and keeping a healthy backlog, resulting in Product Owners being prepared to halp their teams keep their work flowing.

Senior Scrum Master

Confidential, Franklin Lakes, NJ

Responsibilities:

• Coached the team on Agile values so that the team were in agreement on how we would interact wif each other and during the sprint, thereby reducing members from multi-tasking during meeting and members asking the same questions about discussed details of the work
• Coached teams toward self-organization, by encouraging the team to come up solutions when member’s code kept getting overwritten while promoting to QA environment, resulting in members selecting one person to merge all code and utilize version control.
• Promoted collaboration between cross-functional development teams, by working wif SLA, TPOs to create a process to planning ahead 2 sprints for database and API changes. dis stopped the dependency on dummy data.
• Worked closely wif Product Owner to ensure there is a healthy backlog wif refined stories prior to sprint, by, reviewing what makes a story complete, comparing to Definition of Ready, utilizing Poker Planning to understand all the work to be done, and taking time to answer all questions about the story, resulting members not is wasting time during the sprint, figuring out the work to do
• Held teams accountable for meeting iteration/sprint commitments by encouraging the team to be honest about the work they could complete and to stop overcommitting during sprint planning. dis stopped the team from rolling over stories and allowed the team's velocity to increase.
• Enable team to adhere to the process framework ceremonies by holding 5 time boxed ceremonies on a regular cadence, thereby reducing other meetings team members were being pulled into.
• Coached and supported teams in estimation and release planning, by incorporating poker planning so that team members could talk and get a better understanding of all work for each story and agree on the story points; resulting in stories including Development and QA work.
• Mediated, arbitrated, mitigated and facilitated impediments wif the team members, by creating an impediments board and discussing all issues during Daily standup, resulting in attention being driven to issues and getting them resolved quicker.
• Facilitated methods for the team to seek higher productivity levels, by encouraging the team to ask questions during refinement and to work wif tech leads to get more understanding before giving story points on the user story. dis allowed the team to start on time for the sprint and complete all committed stories.
• Awareness of other development teams overall roadmap plan, by attending Tetris planning wif team, ensuring all dependencies are identified by Delivery manager, encouraging the team to get understanding the EPICs and MVPS that are planned for the release, and to speak up about any possible impediments about commitments.
• Encouraged and halped to achieve transparency by widely reporting/publicizing team progress/success to a varied group of stakeholders, by encouraging the TPO to invite all users and stakeholders to the Sprint Review, having the team demonstrate the completed work, displaying the burn down and discussing the learning that took place, gathering the feedback and reprioritizing the backlog based on that feedback for the next sprint.

Scrum Master

Confidential, Atlanta, GA

Responsibilities:

• Created a learning environment for team members during the Retrospective, by brainstorming ideas on improving the organizations, resulting in an annual fundraiser event.
• Facilitated Sprint Planning, by reviewing business goals in the backlog, selecting stories for the month, sizing the work effort(story points), defining ‘done’ for completed products(DOR), determining who could do the tasks(assignments), and how much could be done in the month (release), resulting in the team committing to the work for the release.
• Facilitated Daily Standup, by meeting wif volunteers, vendors, and members to understand and communicate the work daily, what was completed, what was being worked on, and any obstacles that needed resolving.
• Reviewed obstacles and requested halp from the Steering Committee, when team could not resolve, resulting in a focused team and completed tasks.
• Facilitated Sprint Reviews, by meeting wif customers to present ‘Done’ programs, gathered feedback, and learned about the customer and what they want. Also discuss progress wif customer(s) and upcoming events (iterations), resulting in happy customers who will come back.
• Facilitated Sprint Retrospectives, by meeting wif the team, vendors, and volunteers to discuss how to improve the process for the next (Sprint) and to monitor how the team feels and what they need; resulting in building trust wif the team and celebrating the successful Sprint.

Scrum Master

Confidential, Atlanta, GA

Responsibilities:

• Exhibited Lean-Agile leadership and behaviors of a lean-agile mindset, overcoming missed stories and artifacts, by educating the IT-QA team on what needed to be tested, ensuring QA team had the current updated documentation, ensuring QA team were a part of the Agile meetings and tracked the progress of the QA team, resulting in removed obstacles so that Designers could focus on coding, and improved the transparency of the work completed.
• Reinforced Working Agreements, overcoming missing vital members during Dry Runs, by validating the Pre-Production environment was ready prior, resulting in no more interruptions wif the Dry Runs.
• Facilitated the team’s progress toward their delivery goal, overcoming Designers being pulled into other projects wif equal priority and UAT not being completed, by facilitating discussion wif the team on how UAT is a part of a ‘Done’ product, resulting in obtaining dedicated Designers to completed UAT wifin Sprint.
• Facilitated Scrum Retrospective, overcoming Pricing Promotions incorrectly stated on the website, by establishing a Working Agreement between QA and the Content Team, to ensure QA receives and reviews the Content documents, resulting in a dedicated QA resource for verifying promotions each Sprint release.
• Enabled close cooperation across all roles and functionality wif Scrum Work Streams.

QA/Agile

Confidential, Atlanta, GA

Responsibilities:

• Provided guidance to assist the teams in constantly improving the quality of their deliverables and meeting the Definition of Done, overcoming code being overwritten, by guiding the Development team in understanding the need for Version Control builds, resulting in rework being reduced.
• Supported the Product Owner, by ensuring the Grooming Sessions occurred prior to the Sprint Planning so that stories are ‘Ready’ for development to start work.
• Facilitated Sprint Planning, by reviewing Backlog and Business Goals, discussing each for a common understanding, defining ‘Done’ state for each, sizing the work effort, and prioritizing and selecting tasks based on Velocity.
• Created open environment during Daily Scrum meetings, by exhibiting Scrum values: courage, openness, respect, commitment, and focus. Removed barriers by shielding team from external interferences.
• Ensured the Agile/scrum process is followed by leading the team through Transparency, Inspection, and Adaption.

QA/Agile

Confidential, Atlanta, GA

Responsibilities:

• Guided the Development Team on how to get the most from self-organization, overcoming challenges wif meeting Business goals, by empowering the team to manage their committed work, removing obstacles so they can focus on the Agile process and making sure time boxes were adhered to, resulting in the team self-guided themselves through the Agile process.
• Facilitating Sprint Planning by sizing the work, looking Confidential the backlog, selecting stories, discussing for clarity, and creating a definition of ‘Done’.
• Facilitated Daily Scrum wifin 15 minutes, getting status, showing burndown, identifying barriers, tracking remaining hours, and giving updates on obstacles.
• Empowered users by eliciting what they valued in products, resulting in higher satisfaction in Sprints Reviews
• Held TEMPeffective Retrospective by celebrating the success of Sprint, discussing challenges, determining what/how to improve and monitor for next sprint, while encouraging freedom to speak truthfully.

QA/Agile

Confidential, Atlanta, GA

Responsibilities:

• Created an open, honest, and healthy environment, during Daily Scrum meeting by identifying and addressing obstacles/barriers, resulting in an improved Quality of Life for the team.
• Removed impediments and guided the Development Team to remove impediments, overcoming lack of transparency of obstacles, by displaying and discussing the obstacles in the review meeting.
• Anticipating risks, dependencies and managing them proactively, overcoming team work being delayed by other teams, by established weekly Scrum-of-Scrums meeting to discuss impediments and impacts to Sprint Time-Box, resulting in improved communication across teams.
• Improved communication between vendors and IT teams for resolving 3rd party defects.
• Supported the team using a Servant Leadership style and leading by example, overcoming a new Scrum team being established, by fostering a cohesive team built on open communication and dedication to get the work done, resulting in the team engaged in offsite team building activities once a month.
• Led and demonstrated value-add principles to the team, by pursuing perfection of the Scrum process over time.
• Challenged team during Retrospective to improve ‘Done’, removing un-needed steps, and improving collaboration, resulting in meeting sprint goals.